Stata 64 for Mac

I’m way late to the party on this, but a couple months ago Stata released a free 64-bit upgrade for users who already have licenses of Stata 10 for Mac. Note that this upgrade does not download with the usual “update all” command, you need to follow instructions on the website.

The major advantage of this is it lets you access more than 2gb of memory. For reasons that they explain thoroughly it performs calculations faster on many variables but slower on others. If you’re worried about this open your favorite large dataset and type “desc” to see how most of your variables are stored. If most of them are “double” you definitely want 64-bit, if most of them are “byte” maybe not. (They don’t explain how it handles strings). Likewise think about how often you use things like “forvalue” loops, which involve the kind of little numbers that run faster in the old version of Stata.